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Saturday, November 17, 2012

Nashville

Nashville

Episode 6: You're
Gonna Change (Or I'm Gonna Leave)

By: Carlos Uribe

Nashville
is a series about the country music scene and the political scene of
Nashville.

Spoilers
Ahoy!

The
series has largely and succesfully painted Avery as a villanois
character. I'm starting to think that wasn't completely intentional
after this week's episode. He has largely been a character whom
Scarlett thinks will leave him if she pursues her own music career.
He acts petty and jealous all the time. The show hasn't given the
viewers a single scene where Avery is actually happy being in a
relationship with Scarlett. For that matter, why the relationship
matters to both of them has never been defined. They're just dating
but it never seems like it's anything special. Most episodes have had
Scarlett trying to be loyal to Avery while he acts like the world is
against him. To his credit, he doesn't leave Scarlett and he tries to
deal with her finding success immediately after he has spent so much
time failing. This episode has a manager trying to sign him. The deal
with this manager is that she only signs men below thirty that'll
sleep with her. It's ambigious whether Avery figures this out or not
but he doesn't sleep with her when he does go to her house. He can't
because he's loyal. Scarlett breaks up with him because her uncle
told Scarlett that the manager liked to sleep with clients. She
thinks that Avery had gone to the manager's house planning to cheat
on her in order to advance his career. She moves out and into her
uncle's home and Avery goes ahead and sleeps with the manager. The
idea is that Scarlett moved him towards having sex with the manager.
So, I'm confused: did the series mean to potray him as a bad
boyfriend or was that just the actor? Because once you review what he
actually does, he's not really that bad of a guy. He gets mad at
Scarlett every now and then but he does stand with her and he does
refuse to cheat on her. The series has largely been working at
breaking them up from the beginning but it hasn't made any effort to
make us think this is a bad thing. I'm confused on what exactly
Avery's purpose on the show is supposed to be.

In
other news, the show had to find something new to find Juliette. Her
rivalry with Raina was the focus of the pilot but it gradually faded
into the background. When Deacon got fired by Rayna, the show didn't
make any fanfare when he seemed to join Raina. Raina's mother has
been sent to rehab. Her publicity nightmare has subsided enough to
provide her with a new plot but not to really dominate the episode.
This new plot is that her publicist arranges her to go out with a
quarterback named Sean. Sean is a lot like Tim Tebow in that he
doesn't drink or go out. He does play the guitar. The actor they got
to play the quarterback isn't a believable NFL player but I'll go
along and pretend he is. There's nothing wrong with giving Juliette a
love interest but Sean never really becomes anyone who makes any
impression. The only intereting thing is when he punches a member of
the papparazi and the publicist finds a way to lay the blame on
Juliette. If Sean has anger problems, then it can manifest itself
into some serious conflict. The problem is that until he punches the
papparzi guy he's largely a saint. The problem with having a
character that supposedly has no flaw is that it's difficult to care
about him. Juliette might be hooking up with him now but it's hard to
see why this is significant or why I should care. That's a large
problem that Nashville is now facing: there's a lot of elements I
like but they're not really coming together to create a coherent
whole that leads somewhere. It simply feels like the plot wheels are
turning for the sake of it. This Juliette plot is a perfect example
of that: it seems to exist to give her something to do. I could be
proven wrong in a future episode but that's kind of the impression
I'm getting. Consider how quickly the nail polish arc was resolved:
Juliette agreed to do anything the producer wanted but the only thing
we see her do is go on a date and attend some fundraiser. She
complains about both but the show could have taken this a lot
further.

The
mayoral election plot has been there since the beginning but the show
isn't doing anything new to really justify it. I like politics
sub-plots but this show is just crossing things off the list. Give a
scandal to Teddy? Check. Make that scandal appear like a completely
different scandal? Check. Have him slowly lose his ethics as he
starts to play dirty tricks on Coleman? Check. Coleman's side of the
story is also a lot like something that you'd check things off a list
of plot points to hit. There's moments where the politics sub-plot
works: such as a couple weeks when it laid the conflict that got
Deacon fired. That's when the plot worked for the show because it
was something only Nasvhille could do. All that other stuff is
something another show can handle because it's not doing anything new
with it. If Nashville can find a way to make all of this politics
sub-plot work into what makes this series unigue then it wouldn't
feel as much as a waste of time as it does. It's becoming less and
less difficult to actually care.

Finally,
there's what Rayna did this episode. She went and found herself a new
producer. Only this isn't just any producer. This is a rock producer
that has never worked on country before. Rayna wants him because she
thinks that he can bring her music alive like nobody else can. He
predictably rejects her at first but she predictably convinces him to
record her song. This produces an amazing song that the record label
boss loves until he learns who produced it. It looks like the label
drama is back on although I'm a bit confused. The entire pilot had
ended with Raina basically leaving the label but the subsequent
episodes have shown that's not true. The entire question becomes
exactly why didn't another label buy out Raina's contract? What makes
all this more confonuding is we still don't know where Nashville
plans to take this entire plot. There's nothing wrong with keeping us
on our toes but we should at least have an idea where Nashville is
planning to take us. Not getting across has hurt any narrative
momentum each epsiode of Nashville keeps building.

That's
the problem with Nashville right now: what story is it trying to
tell? The pilot had given the show a lot of room of where to take the
series. It had given the show a way to unite all the characters under
a plot that explored the city of Nashville and how the actions of
each character had ramifications. The pilot's promise of the series
was strong. The problem is that Nashville looked at all the ideas
that the pilot had laid out and the series ignored them. The
consequences of characters actions are ignored in order to move to
the next plot point which makes each action seem less significant
than it actually is. This isn't a bad episode but it's the latest in
a line of episodes that don't seem to actually be going anywhere.